Charles Rayne Kruger (29 January 1922 – 21 December 2002) was a South African author and property developer.
Charles Rayne Kruger was born on 29 January 1922 in Queenstown, in the eastern Cape Province, the son of an unmarried 17-year-old daughter of a British Army officer. As his father had disappeared, his mother married Victor Kruger, a Johannesburg estate agent. He was educated at Jeppe High School and the University of the Witwatersrand, but was sent down after an escapade with some donkeys and became an articled clerk in a law firm in Johannesburg. During the Second World War, his eyesight was too poor for him to get into one of the armed forces, but he served as a steward aboard a merchant ship, which gave him the material for his first book, Tanker. After the war, he qualified as a lawyer and joined a theatrical company.
Kruger's first wife was the actress Nan Munro, a widow, 16 years older than him, with three children, including John Gau. They later divorced, and he married the restaurateur, chef and television presenter Prue Leith. They had a son, the Conservative, and later Reform UK, MP Danny Kruger, and adopted a Cambodian daughter, Li-Da.
Publications
Tanker (novel), London: Longman's Green & Co, 1952 The Spectacle (crime novel), London: Longman's Green & Co, 1953 Young Villain With Wings (crime novel), London: Longman's Green & Co, 1953 My Name is Celia (novel), London: Longman's Green & Co, 1954 The Even Keel (crime novel), London: Longman's Green & Co, 1955 Ferguson (crime novel), London: Longman's Green & Co, 1956 Goodbye Dolly Gray: The Story of the Boer War (non-fiction), London: Cassell, 1959 The Devil's Discus (non-fiction), London: Cassell, 1964 All Under Heaven: A Complete History of China (non-fiction), Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2003
References